This item provides a more detailed explanation of the above
procedure for Unix systems. Before you install MailMan,
make sure that you have Perl 5 installed. On most Unix
systems, especially web hosting systems, Perl will already
be installed. If Perl is not installed, or if Perl version
5 is not installed, consult your system administrator.
1. Copy the distribution to the location that you want to
unpack it in. “/public_html/mailman/” in the above example.
2. Unpack the distribution with tar. On most systems you
can type “tar –zxvf <distribution>.tgz” and your system will
expand the file. You should now have a collection of
“i_*.gif” files, “t_*.htm” files, “mailman.cgi”, “cgi-
lib.pl”, and some documentation (this document, in
particular). On systems where that doesn’t work, try
“gnutar –zxvf <distribution>.tgz”. If that doesn’t work,
you will have to manually unzip the file with “gunzip” and
then untar the file with “tar –xvf <distribution>.tar”. If
all else fails, fetch the NT distribution and unzip it.
3. Make sure that your copy of “mailman.cgi” is executable
by issuing the command “chmod 755 mailman.cgi” Your copy of
“cgi-lib.pl” must also be executable. “chmod 755 cgi-
lib.pl”. Also, just to be sure, make sure that your
“t_*.htm” and “i_*.gif” files are marked so that the web
server process can read them. Sometimes you can read your
own files, but you inadvertently have your files set so that
your web server can’t access them. These are the same rules
that you should be following when you publish ordinary web
content. “chmod 644 i_*.gif t_*.htm” should do the trick.
4. Make sure that the first line of the “mailman.cgi” file
refers to the correct location of your Perl interpreter. Be
warned that it probably does not. You can find out where
your Perl interpreter is located on most Unix systems by
typing “where perl” on the command line. Some system
administrators keep Perl 4 and Perl 5 both installed at the
same time, with “perl” referring to Perl 4 and “Perl” or
“perl5” referring to Perl 5. If your system operates this
way, make sure that you are referring to the correct
location of Perl 5. MailMan will not operate with Perl 4.
Check your installation by loading “mailman.cgi” in your web
browser through your web server. In the above example, the
URL to access MailMan would likely be
<URL:http://yourserver/mailman/mailman.cgi>.

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